Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance

The Shoah Museum in Belgium is established in a place with which it has historical connections: a wing of the former General Dossin de Saint-Georges barracks in Malines. This small Flemish town is located halfway between Brussels and Antwerp where most of the Jews in this country live. This is where the Reich's Security detachment set up its assembly camp.

This Sammellager Mecheln was the starting point of a one-way deportation route. Between 1942 and 1944, some 28 convoys of 25,257 prisoners were shipped from Malines to Auschwitz. Two-thirds of them died upon arrival. Of the other third, only 1,207 prisoners survived an inhuman captivity to see the liberation of the Nazi camps. The museum in Malines, a memorial, has been designed as the antechamber of death. Centering on this fatal deportation, it presents the history of the "Final Solution" in Belgium and in Europe.

It allows us to understand how in Belgium nearly one out of two Jews perished during the Second World War. Furthermore, it is not only a museum about the deportation of Belgian Jews, but also about their resistance. Thanks to the support they received from the Belgian people, many managed to escape from their Nazi pursuers and their collaborators.

Stumbling Stone

Fortification

Looking for reliable information or news facts about WW2? Do you want to create your own battlefield tour to sights of wars from the past? Or are you interested in war medals and their recipients? TracesOfWar.com tells you more!